derrida on word processors
Posted: May 17th, 2006 | Author: alicetiara | Filed under: internet culture | 1 Comment »I’m taking my PhD candidacy exams this week hence my long absence. I bet you didn’t know Derrida wrote about word processors, quite a bit. (Maybe you did. I think most of the people reading this are just as overeducated as I am.)
Two quotes from Derrida’s Paper Machine.
“I’ve recently started using the mechanical spell-check. It’s instructive, too: what are the words that are not regarded as normal or acceptable in French usage, and so remain censored, these days by the contemporary dictionary incorporated in the machine, as they would be by some other readership, some other media power for instance?” (26)
and
LA QUINZAINE LITTERAIRE: You can tell who’s the master– the one with no machine on the desk.
DERRIDA: It’s the old figure of the master– the political leader, the thinker, the poet. No machine. No direct relationship with the machine. The relationship with the machine is secondary, auxiliary, mediated by the secretary-slave– too often, and it’s not accidental, by the woman secretary. We should speak about the word processor, power, and sexual difference. Power has to be able to be mediated, if not delegated, in order to exist. At any rate– and this is not always different– to appear.
(30).
Derrida also had much to say about hypertext, linking, networks, and the internet, even an Email to Freud. A book that gathered all his sayings on high tech would be fantastic.